Don Hertzfeldt and his animated films

I first saw Don Hertzfeldt's animated short Rejected about 13 or 14 years ago. Lines like "my spoon is too big!" and "I am a banana!" are a part of my lexicon of humor, but I was totally unaware that Don has continued to produce animated films in his same, unique style.

Last night a friend showed me the feature on Netflix called It's Such a Beautiful Day, an hour long film which is actually a compilation of 3 short films he made. It's almost entirely stick figures, and it follows the life of Bill, a rather bland person who battles mental health issues and a degenerative brain disease. The humor is very dark, but also really necessary to contrast how tragic a story it was. It definitely takes you to some uncomfortable places, ala David Lynch films. It was so tragic and depressing, but also funny, uplifting, and beautiful. What a masterpiece. If your mental health is questionable, it may not be a good thing to watch.

He's got another short on Netflix called World of Tomorrow where people survive death as digitally copied consciousness, and the consciousness of a long dead person meets a clone descendant of herself from the future. It was also a bit of a mindfuu, but really it's an incredible piece of art.

If you like things that are depressing and tragic, but in a beautiful way, and with very dark humor, I suggest you check these out. He has these films available on Blu-Ray from his site www.bitterfilms.com too, if you don't have Netflix.

I funded the blu-ray release of that through kickstarter several months back, and received it recently. It's Such a Beautiful Day and World of Tomorrow are goddam masterpieces, and both are incredibly depressing, the latter sort of subtly.
It's sort of funny to me, since he was popular way back when I was in college for a short film called "Rejected," which was kind of...Adult Swim style humor? It was quite shocking and bizarre and exactly the kind of thing college students loved. "MY SPOON IS TOO BIG" was a popular T-shirt among nerds at my school. It wasn't totally artless, but it had no hint at all of what was to come several years later.

I know for sure that Netflix has World of Tomorrow, and I know it had It's Such a Beautiful Day at some point too (it might still?).

World of Tomorrow is about a little girl in the present being visited by a (several generations down) clone of herself from the future, who then takes her on a tour explaining the future. It's got a lot of humor, but it's crushingly depressing and has a ton of subtly profound meditation on the human condition.

It's such a beautiful day is three shorts stuck together. The first is soul-crushing, yet has some bizarre humor in it, and is about a man suffering from a degenerative mental illness. The second short is the least of the three, and is about the same character from a slightly different perspective, one where he sort of pontificates on his genetics and how they are tied to this condition. The third is probably the most depressing thing I've ever seen, but it's kind of beautiful, too. The only thing I can possibly think of to compare the trilogy to is "Synecdoche New York," but the tone is radically different and I think many people who can't stand Synedoche can still get something out of this.

Best quote: &#8220;Someone sits on the shore and tells him how the waves have been there long before Bill existed, and that they&#8217;ll still be there long after he&#8217;s gone. Bill looks out at the water and thinks of all the wonderful things he will do with his life.&#8221;

Defining moment: In the epic finale, a stick hero is reborn into an ageless existence and learns all the secrets of the universe.

How satisfying it is to find Don Hertzfeldt&#8217;s self-made saga of schizophrenia and self-loss nestling comfortably in the higher reaches of our rankings. Written, directed, produced, animated, photographed, voiced and distributed entirely by Hertzfeldt himself (he admits to getting a little help with the editing), It&#8217;s Such a Beautiful Day is the tale of a young everyman, Bill, who finds his mind and his world unexpectedly going to pieces.

Hertzfeldt&#8217;s style may have started off simple, with stick figures and basic line drawings, but by the time of this feature, it had broadened to include a dizzying array of in-camera, nondigital visual effects. The result is one of the great outsider artworks of the modern era, at once sympathetic and shocking, beautiful and horrifying, angry and hilarious, uplifting and almost unbearably sad. Seek it out.&#8212;Tom Huddleston